About book The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy---How To Save Yourself And Your Country (2012)
This starts off with a bang - Peter Schiff compares the 1920-21 downturn (when all the soldiers from WWI came home, creating hard times and massive unemployment, and the government did very little to ease these bad times, with strikingly positive results) to the latest economic downturns in 2000-01 and 2007-08 when the government policy (read Federal Reserve) was to lower interest rates and flood the market with cheap currency, with the result that the free market economy no longer exists; we are instead living through a "manipulated market economy". Mr. Schiff argues that, just as the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, and the housing bubble bust in 2008, so must the "government bubble" burst in the not-too-near future, leaving all of us broke and fending for ourselves. This just seems a bit too strident for me. Mr. Schiff is arguing the standard Tea Party line here, where everything to do with government must be eliminated. Abolish Medicare, abolish Social Security, close all higher education and eliminate all grants, etc etc. Frankly, I stopped reading when I got to the part about eliminating Social Security, where he advised all seniors to sell off all their assets as they got older, and then look to the charity of their families and other welfare organizations as they got older. Seriously? An excellent survey of the precarious economic landscape facing the United States. The humour and wit of the author make the book really a fun read and at the same time conscious citizen gets some reason to be scared of the future, the job he/she is holding, the money he/she is saving and so on. May be the author is all wrong, may be it's all just the rants of another doomsday economist, but he seems to have a point.
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Incredibly insightful. (Though plenty depressing- but that isn't Peter's fault.)
—Andie
Bah thinks he can call every calamity now that he called the housing crash.
—Dani
If you want an interesting read, read the first book- not this follow on.
—lulu
Excellent book from the man who has predicted everything.
—kayla
